The two robot arms performed dancing and drumming in a precise synchronized and seamless manner. Importantly, the communication between the two cooperating robots is based on 5G-oriented technical prototypes rather than cable.

Since Kuka and Huawei signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) at CeBIT 2016, both sides have spent a lot of effort on concentrated research and testing on cellular wireless technology enabling smart manufacturing, and speeding up industry 4.0 transformation.

The successful demo at MWC 2017 is a milestone for the joint innovation project between Kuka and Huawei and verifies the cellular based real time control for smart manufacturing. According to the joint test in Kuka’s innovation Lab, the 5G live demonstration highlighted some of the capabilities offered by the new technology, achieving latency as low as 1ms with 1μs clock synchronization and a reliability of 99.999%.

“5G cellular wireless technology will enable Kuka to provide robot-based production systems with even more outstanding flexibility through wireless machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud communication”, said Stefan Lampa, CEO of Kuka Robotics.

The connections in smart manufacturing with wireless technology will be a future trend, according to a prediction from Huawei X Labs, there will be over 10 billion industrial connections in Smart Manufacturing by 2025.

“Industrial robots with cellular communication technology is one of the four research areas for Huawei X Labs in 2017. The cellular connectivity will play an important role for the smart manufacturing,” said Ying Weimin, President of Huawei R&D Wireless Networks. “Huawei X Labs will continually cooperate with more partners to explore together and innovate together for future mobile application scenarios.”